Unleash Breakthrough Ideas, and Develop Your Own Creative Potential

Text: Chia-Yi Lee
Translation: Steve J. Lin

What do entrepreneurs do to take their first step in starting up their businesses? TCU wants to foster an innovative and creative environment, and to amplify students’ ingenious and entrepreneurial spirits, thus we invited Dr. Tsu-Wang Shen, a faculty member of the Department of Medical Informatics, to offer a course named “Innovation Design.” This course will use a wide variety of experiential methods, including conducting market analysis, teaching problem solving skills, utilizing intellectual property rights wisely, writing business plans, communicating with team members, doing team projects, etc. This is an elective course, and the class hours are from 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon, every Friday.

The curator of TED, Chris Anderson, predicted that small businesses will become big engines for the global economy, and big companies will play lesser roles. Dr. Tsu-Wang Shen anticipates small and solid industries will keep flourishing, and the key is the nurturing of outstanding employees. Our project-based and experiential classes will bring together students from four colleges, to cooperate and undertake real-world challenges. Each week, a guest expert will share his/her experience, and dialogue with students for thirty minutes. In addition, these experts will do projects with students at the TCU campus or off-campus. We will use different ways, including workshops, case studies, simulations, and team projects, supported by guest speakers and readings, to work with students. The final will consist of a contest.

“Do I need to have an engineering background?” many TCU students have asked. Dr. Shen wishes to bring students from all colleges together, and expects them to unleash their breakthrough ideas to generate new products or innovative services, which can take various forms, such as formulating a promotion strategy, making a movie, or teaching a health subject. The business world changes rapidly, so for those who want to assist their family businesses to cope with the changes, or help businesses in Hualien to keep going, this course will be very helpful.

The teaching team will work with the students attentively. In addition to TCU’s faculty members of different disciplines, many industry experts associated with various industries or professional fields will also be with our students.

This course was started by Chief Innovation Officer Michael Chu of the National Industry Innovation Program on Healthcare. Michael mentioned that 70% of newly started businesses fail, which is due to business partners not being able to get along with each other, so Michael encourages students to team up with their future partners while studying at TCU. Many schools offer innovation related courses. Before taking the course, each student needs to ask: “Why do I want to take this course? Do I wish to get credit hours, take part in innovation related competitions, try out different things, or start up a business?” To win in any competition, originality is the key. Yet, starting a business requires much more than originality, thus management capability is crucial.

In Taiwan, start-up businesses don’t receive as much help from venture capitalists as those overseas. “Angel investors” in the US provide venture capital for start-ups, share their experiences, technical expertise and offer their connections to those start-ups. Michael used Flux NTU as an example, to demonstrate how a Taiwanese start-up can receive various kinds of assistance from overseas. A group of National Taiwan University (NTU) students spent two years to create a FLUX 3D Printer, an innovation that is a revolution of 3D printing technology. Later on, they accessed Kickstarter, a company based in the US and the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, and received a funding of 1.64 million US dollars. Moreover, their innovation impressed angel investors, so the NTU students were invited by those angel investors to go to Silicon Valley in the US, and observed how those US companies operate. Now their 3D printers are in the marketplace. Dr. Ingrid Liu, TCU’s Vice President, encourages TCU students to collaborate with each other and tackle real-world challenges, and prepare themselves to start-up businesses, or develop their skills to increase impact in their fields of study. TCU’s faculty members are willing to work with students, and the Tzu-Cheng Yi-Te Association’s dads and moms, many of them industrial experts, are also ready to listen to students’ needs and answer their calls.